Category Archives: Current Events

Warren Jeffs’ total control over followers from prison questioned

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—Stuart A. Wright

The April 4 news story by ABC News regarding the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), Warren Jeffs is misleading in several respects. The reporter, Amy Robach, asserts that “there are some people who believe that he is more powerful now that he is behind bars than he was when he was living in that community.” Played to the listening audience, a Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) official’s statement (recorded by telephone) implies a sense of helplessness: “If somebody comes in and visits with [Jeffs] and he gives them instructions and they take them back by word of mouth, there’s just nothing we can do to control that.” In the closing segment, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer asks Robach if the young girls are still in danger. Robach responds by stating that “according to every ex-FLDS member we’ve spoken to, the answer is unfortunately yes. The police say they have very little authority at this point because the parents of these young girls and children are relinquishing the control over to other adults as has been dictated by Warren Jeffs and police say without a witness, there is very little they can do.”

I would like to counter the first claim that Jeffs is somehow more powerful than ever in his incarcerated state. While Jeffs is still issuing edicts from prison, there are approximately 1,500 members who are not in compliance with his demands. Simply put, the community is in disarray. Several hundred members have left and hundreds more are following another rival leader, William E. Jessop, who was a former FLDS bishop and who rejects the authority of Jeffs. In contrast to Jeffs, Jessop has liberalized gender roles, condemned underage marriage, and promoted high school and college education. Therefore, it is clear that Jeffs does not have “complete control” over the FLDS. And since Jeffs is never likely to leave prison, his authority will likely wane, not increase.

In terms of the second claim that the police has little authority in FLDS cases concerning young girls, I would like to demonstrate that the state actually has considerable space to intervene. The District Court in Texas, in vacating its conservatorship over the FLDS children at the YFZ Ranch in 2008, mandated that each parent, child, or other person, could not interfere with the ongoing supervision of the children by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. In other words, the state may visit the home of the children to interview and even examine (medically or psychologically) at any time, without announcing the visit ahead of time. Thus, there is extensive state control over the young FLDS girls in Texas. Moreover, the families and children are not allowed to leave the state, further underscoring its authority in a space that media discourse has claimed it has had none. As well, I question whether family and children protective services in southern Utah or Northern Arizona, where the main communities are located, are as powerless as implied.

Finally, let’s draw attention to reporter Robach’s preface to the claim that the young girls are in danger. She states, “According to every ex-FLDS member we’ve spoken to….” There are volumes of research literature to show that the accounts of ex-members of controversial religious groups such as the FLDS are notoriously unreliable. My book (co-edited with James T. Richardson) on the FLDS raid, specifically addresses this unreliability. I am not discounting all of these accounts, but it’s important for us to consider the sources and recognize that some ex-members are disgruntled and may have an axe to grind; they are not purely objective or impartial sources, and accordingly inflect our understanding of the events with their biases.

Stuart A. Wright is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of  Sociology, Social Work & Criminal Justice at Lamar University.  He is the co-editor (with James T. Richardson) of Saints Under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (NYU Press, 2011).

Blame the popes, not the nuns

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—Margaret M. McGuinness

Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to resign from the papacy has generated a number of commentaries, op-ed pieces, and blog posts on the significance of the pontiff’s actions for the future of both the throne of St. Peter and the greater Catholic Church. Some writers have focused in particular on what this means for U.S. sisters and nuns who have had their differences with Catholic clerical leaders over the years. Most American women religious, the prevailing institutional argument claims, have deviated from traditional Catholic teaching, especially those related to abortion, same-sex marriage, and an all-male priesthood. In addition, sisters have moved too far from their convents and are now engaged in advocacy work—or ministry, depending on your point of view—that focuses too much on the poor and underserved.

When examining the history of women religious, however, it is hard to ignore the role the papacy played in leading sisters and nuns to embrace the world and its problems. Although Bonifice VIII issued a bull, or proclamation, ordering nuns to be cloistered in 1298, twentieth-century popes have taken a somewhat different approach. In 1929, Pius XI encouraged sisters to receive the education necessary for staffing parochial schools. Almost thirty years later, in 1958, his successor, Pius XII, urged religious communities to abandon those practices that kept them from being in touch with the modern world.

By the time of Pius XII’s call for women religious to consider their role in contemporary society, sisters and nuns had taken Pius XI’s admonition to heart. Focused on the education of nuns, the Sister Formation Conference (SFC) developed the Everett curriculum, which focused on the liberal arts, Catholic social teaching, and ways to effect “structural change in society.”  Their education, combined with several documents produced by the bishops at the second Vatican Council (1962-1965)—notably Lumen Gentium (1964), Gaudium et Spes (1965), and the Decree on the Renewal of Religious Life, (Perfectae Caritatis, 1965)—led sisters to conclude that they were called to return to the original reasons behind the founding of their communities; in other words, they were to read the “signs of the times” and meet the needs of twentieth-century Americans.

American women religious of the twenty-first century continue to teach school and nurse the sick, but they also minister to the undocumented, the poor, and those living on death rows throughout our nation’s prisons. Who is to blame for women religious leaving the traditional cloister and entering a ministry devoted to advocacy and social justice? Maybe, just maybe, it’s the popes.

Margaret M. McGuinness is Professor of Religion and Executive Director of the Office of Mission Integration at La Salle University, Philadelphia. She is the author of Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America (NYU Press, 2013).

Russia’s ban and the real issues facing adoption today

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—Laura Briggs

The Russian adoption ban and the U.S. Magnitsky Act offer all the absurdity of the Cold War, with less geopolitically at stake. Both sides are claiming the other is cruel to children, and neither is making much sense. There are real issues to talk about related to the care of children, but the conversation in the blogosphere and the press on both the Russian and U.S. sides relies on caricatures of each other, children, and adoption.

In early December, Congress passed and Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which was aimed at Russian officials responsible for the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who had supposedly uncovered a tax fraud scheme by Russian officials against Hermitage Capital Management, a U.K.-based financial company that lobbied heavily for the Act. It also imposed visa and financial sanctions against all Russian officials responsible for “gross violations of human rights.” It’s unclear at best what this means, but it does seem to violate U.S. and international law—Russian officials apparently could have assets frozen and even be incarcerated if they set foot on U.S. soil, based simply on allegations by U.S. NGOs.

Russia responded by denouncing the hypocrisy of the U.S.—noting human rights abuses in Guantánamo’s prison—and its parliament passed the Dima Yakovlev Act, which banned U.S. NGOs, including those involved with adoptions, from operating in Russia. Dima Yakovlev was an adopted Russian toddler who died in July 2008 when his new father left him strapped in a hot car for nine hours in a Washington, D.C. area parking lot. The case made headlines in Russia when the father was acquitted on manslaughter charges, joining a steady stream of other terrible cases reported in the press of Russian adoptees being beaten, neglected, and killed by their U.S. parents—igniting calls for an international adoption ban.

While the actions of a mother in Tennessee, who put her seven-year old adopted son from Russia on a plane back to that country in 2010, made headlines in the U.S., for Russians it was just another in a long series, a steady drumbeat of distressing stories about serious abuse of Russian adoptees. While there is little doubt that it was the Magnitsky Act that precipitated the ban on U.S. adoptions from Russia, it wouldn’t have been possible to mobilize so quickly to stop them if there were not already a great deal of pre-existing political sentiment in this direction.

The whole thing seems like nothing so much as the Nixon-Krushchev kitchen debate, the 1959 exchange between the two leaders about a washing machine in a model house they were touring with press in tow. Krushchev accused the U.S. of “capitalist attitudes” that exploited and oppressed women in the home. Nixon touted the U.S. standard of living, and said that while misogynist attitudes were universal, the purpose of things like washing machines was to make things easier for “our housewives.”

The Magnitsky-Yakovlev exchange mirrors this conversation in all its foolishness. The trouble with the U.S. position is that it is entirely too sentimental about how great the nuclear family is for children, while the Russian side is too cynical. For one thing, the U.S. press keeps talking about Russian “orphans.” But almost none of the children living in large Russian institutions—about 120,000, according to most estimates—are actually orphans. They are, like the 400,000 children in the U.S. child welfare system, victims of variously bad circumstances, from parental homelessness to alcoholism or mental illness to abuse. Some have physical or emotional disabilities that make it very difficult for them to live in a family. Certainly the Russian child welfare system has few things to recommend it, being among other things severely underfunded. (One possibly productive side-effect of all of this is the promise of more funding flowing to Russian child-welfare institutions.)

On the U.S. side, after our own experiments with large-scale institutions for children through the 1960s, we have swung to a new anti-institutional extreme that is informing our desire to “rescue” Russian “orphans.” We imagine that virtually all children—no matter what their history, their emotional or physical state, or the likelihood that their parents might return for them or at least visit—would be better off in a nuclear family. This is sentimental and naïve. While most adoptions of children from Russian institutions go well, post-institutional children or those dealing with the aftermath of abuse—whether they’re from U.S. foster care, Russian orphanages, or any number of other places—sometimes have extremely challenging behaviors, outside the box of normal childhood challenges. Some are frighteningly violent, which accounts for some (although by no means all) of the reports of U.S. parents responding with terrible violence of their own to Russian adoptees. The Tennessee single mother who returned her son to Russia had told the local sheriff in her town that the seven-year-old had made credible threats that he would burn the house down while she and her other children slept. She got no help. As the viral circulation of the blog post known as “I am Adam Lanza’s mother” made clear, we have few supports and essentially no idea what to do when families say they are afraid of their children’s violence. This, alongside a rejection of the therapeutic culture that seems to have little to offer either parents or children in these situations, provokes a certain acquiescence and even support for the kind of “spare the rod, spoil the child” parenting that can lead to horrific abuse.

The Russians, like Krushchev in 1959, imagine our families as places that exploit the weak and vulnerable—children, this time.

There is nothing good about the Magnitsky-Yakovlev exchange, nor what it produces for institutionalized Russian children or adoptees in the U.S. But let’s use this opportunity to talk about real issues facing children, parents, and states in the U.S., Russia, and across the globe.

>> This post also appeared on the author’s blog. Click here for more.

Laura Briggs is Associate Professor and Department Head of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her book International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children was published by NYU Press in 2009.

New Spreadable Media essays: Week 3

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We’re at week three since launching the online component of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture!

Here are this week’s round of web exclusive essays written by selected contributors who have shaped the argument put forth in Spreadable Media:

  • “The Value of Retrogames“—Bob Rehak, a film and media studies professor at Swarthmore College, examines how grassroots interest in residual media and culture may coalesce online, sparking new kinds of cultural practices and production.
  • Clothing has passed between different kinds of exchanges for centuries, acquiring different meanings and values in the process—and, in “A Global History of Secondhand Clothing,” filmmaker and MIT media historian Hanna Rose Shell traces and examines those shifting sartorial roles.
  • In “Retrobrands and Retromarketing,” York University professor Robert V. Kozinets discusses the strategies through which companies engage in “retrobranding,” reviving or relaunching brands from the past in ways that capitalize on existing fandoms and provide launching points for the creation of new markets.

Check ‘em out, and stay tuned at http://spreadablemedia.org/essays—where each week leading up to the book’s publication (in January 2013!), a new batch of exclusive essays will be released.

(And hey! Feel free to debate/critique/trash each piece in the comments section. Expand the conversation, transform the ideas. That’s how spreadable media works.)

Following the science of eyewitness identification

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—David A. Harris

A decision by Oregon’s Supreme Court on eyewitness identification procedures has re-set the way that juries and courts in that state will think about eyewitness identification.

According to the New York Times editorial on the case, the ruling shifts the burden of proof to prosecutors to prove that eyewitness identifications are reliable before they can be admitted in court. Before last week’s decision, the rule had been that identifications were generally admitted; it was up to the defense in individual cases to prove that an identification was not reliable.

But at least as important as the new rule itself was the reason that the Oregon court abandoned its old precedent: the court had concluded that the old rule was based on assumptions about eyewitness testimony no longer supported by the science. Thus the new case represents a textbook case of a court forcing law enforcement away from the failed evidence of discredited methods, and toward methods that accord with what science teaches us now.

Under the old rule, Oregon judges looked at five factors when evaluating an eyewitness identification: opportunity to view the alleged perpetrator, attention to identifying features, timing and completeness of description given after the event, certainty of description and identification by witness, and lapse of time between original observation and the subsequent identification. Looking at these factors from the vantage point of the present day, the Oregon court found them “incomplete and, at times, inconsistent with modern scientific findings.” Given the science on eyewitness identification that is by now well established, the court prescribed a new approach, including the change in the burden of proof.

That’s what the Oregon Supreme Court did, but here is why they did it:

…[W]e believe that it is imperative that law enforcement, the bench, and the bar be informed of the existence of current scientific research and literature regarding the reliability of eyewitness identification because, as an evidentiary matter, the reliability of eyewitness identification is central to a criminal justice system dedicated to the dual principles of accountability and fairness.

It’s hard to imagine a better summing up of the ideas behind Failed Evidence, and why the fight to overcome law enforcement’s general resistance to science is so important.

This article originally appeared on the author’s blog—read it here.

David A. Harris is Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Good Cops: The Case for Preventive Policing and Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work.

Election 2012: The death of the Southern Strategy?

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—Steven A. Ramirez

For many decades the GOP played the politics of racial divisiveness to further the cause of tax cuts, deregulation and a more limited federal government. The election of 2012 promises to end this ugly chapter in American politics. The ultimate outcome will change our political landscape in far-reaching ways.

Surprisingly, Republican leaders openly admit that their party used race to appeal to white voters (particularly in the old Confederacy) disaffected with the perceived embrace of racial equality within the Democratic Party. Republican strategist Kevin Phillips openly admitted to seeking out the votes of “negrophobe whites” in the New York Times in 1970. The Nation very recently posted the actual audio recording of Reagan Administration Official Lee Atwater articulating how the GOP implemented the Southern Strategy in sordid (and highly offensive) detail in 1981. Atwater unabashedly ties the politics of race to economic issues such as tax cuts. Two Republican National Committee Chairs actually apologized for the Southern Strategy.

In my book Lawless Capitalism, I argue that the politics of racial division led directly to the subprime debacle through massive financial deregulation beginning in the Reagan Administration. Deregulation of mortgage lending, the basic structure of globalization, and financial consolidation all find their roots in the Reagan Administration. Indeed, the fundamental explosion in American debt started in 1980. To be fair, the Democrats contributed much to the crisis too. The crisis resulted from longstanding and bipartisan policies. Nevertheless, the Southern Strategy dominated the political scene in the decades preceding the subprime debacle.

The election of 2012 may spell the end of the Southern Strategy, at least as a means of GOP success. African American and Latino voters turned out in record numbers. Asian American voters supported President Obama over Mitt Romney by 73-26, a margin that exceeds Obama’s advantage among Latino voters.

The viability of the GOP’s Southern Strategy will continue to fade. Asian Americans form the fastest growing minority group in the nation. A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Research Center projects that the voting power of Hispanics will double by 2030—to nearly half of the electorate. If the Democrats continue to run candidates of color to energize this base, then these growing voting groups will constitute a formidable foundation for a durable Democratic majority. Meanwhile, the GOP base still today favors discriminatory practices, such as anti-immigration laws and legislation designed to suppress the vote of minority communities.

On issues relating to immigration, education, voting rights, the war on drugs, and many others, a fundamental change in political calculus is afoot. I contend the change may be even more monumental than such core issues. Ultimately, without the ability of governing elites to use the politics of racial division to further their interests, the very high level of economic inequality currently burdening our nation may be unsustainable.

Steven A. Ramirez is Professor of Law at Loyola University of Chicago, where he also directs the Business and Corporate Governance Law Center. His book, Lawless Capitalism: The Subprime Crisis and the Case for an Economic Rule of Law, will publish in December 2012.

Stop the bleeding: Prescriptions to heal racial economic inequality in America

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—F. Michael Higginbotham

Recently, Americans elected Barack Obama as President for a second term. When Obama began his first term, economic disparities between blacks and whites were alarmingly wide. Black unemployment, poverty, and homelessness were twice that of whites. Wealth accumulation for blacks was one twentieth of what it was for whites. A similar disparity existed for Latinos/as. During the last four years, the gap widened.

It’s important to recognize that racial inequality today is a reality. There is no such place as a post racial America. While the causes of racism are more complex than they were under discriminatory laws of the Jim Crow Era, today this divide is primarily caused by choices that result in economic hardship, housing isolation, education inequity, and criminal justice stereotyping.

One choice is exemplified in the story of Tim Carter and Richard Thomas, arrested in 2004 in separate incidents three months apart in nearly the same location in St. Petersburg, Florida. Police found one rock of cocaine on Mr. Carter, who is white, and a crack pipe with cocaine residue, on Mr. Thomas, who is black.

Both men claimed drug addictions, neither had any prior felony arrests or convictions, and both men potentially faced five years in prison. Mr. Carter had his prosecution withheld, and the judge sent him to drug rehabilitation. Mr. Thomas was prosecuted, convicted and went to prison. Their only apparent difference was race.

Another choice is reflected in the pattern of property ownership and the fact that whites continue to embrace the “tipping point” notion in housing integration. “Tipping point” bigotry inspired Jeremy Parady, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiracy to commit arson in a series of fires in a new housing development in Southern Maryland. Parady admitted that he set fire to this development because many of the buyers were blacks and the surrounding neighborhood was mostly white.

While these disparities have been persistent, they need not be permanent. As a long term strategy, let’s equalize funding for public schools, prohibit racial profiling, eliminate laws that have a severe racially disproportionate impact, redefine our notion of racism to include negligent acts, criminalize intentional acts of racism, and increase integration in neighborhoods and schools. Such changes would go a long way to reducing current racial inequities.

For now as a start, let’s pass the American Jobs Act which contains several components that would reduce racial inequality in employment. First, the act is aimed at revitalizing and rebuilding communities where unemployment has risen most sharply, especially urban areas. Many such areas have a high percentage of black unemployment. Second, the act is aimed at neighborhoods where the foreclosure rates are highest. This includes many areas with high concentrations of blacks. Third, the act is aimed at decreasing youth unemployment by creating summer and year-round jobs for impoverished teenagers and young adults. Many of these youths are black with little chance of finding employment under current economic circumstances.

Too many Americans are hurting under this extended economic slump. Blacks and Latinos/as have been particularly hit hard with unemployment near 15%. Healing the racial divide must begin soon. Stopping the bleeding in employment discrimination must begin now.

F. Michael Higginbotham is the Wilson H. Elkins Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He is the author of Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions and Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America (forthcoming from NYU Press, March 2013).

In memoriam: Alfred F. Young
(1925-2012)

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—Gregory Nobles

I am both saddened and honored to write a tribute to my friend and NYU Press co-author Al Young, who died on November 6, after suffering two heart attacks. Back in May, when he had the first one, he wrote, in his unsentimental and sort of self-deprecating fashion, that, “I talk very little, if that can be imagined.” I couldn’t imagine that, in fact, and I wrote back to express my surprise and concern about his condition, telling him how much the rest of us in the profession still needed him. Once again, he responded in his usual straightforward way: “Why the surprise: I am 87 after all. Dubious about crowds waiting for the word from me, but maybe there are a few hurrahs.”

There are, and will always be, many hurrahs for Al Young from a very loyal crowd of historians who have indeed waited for and learned from his words. Tens of thousands of those words came in the many books he wrote—two of which he published with NYU Press. These include Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution (2006) and Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding (2011), on which I was co-author. For over thirty years, as long as I’ve been reading Al Young’s work, I’ve been impressed not just with the reach of his remarkable intellect, but with the intensity of his scholarly knowledge of early American history. It’s hard to imagine anyone who knew the field better or cared more about really getting history right, especially about getting ordinary people—and their politics—into the picture. He did that himself, of course, whether writing about groups such as Massachusetts mechanics or individual figures like George Robert Twelves Hewes or Deborah Sampson. He also promoted and praised that approach in other historians, and he now has a legion of “younger” scholars—some of whom, like me, are now in their sixties—who proudly carry his influence in their own works.

The words I most value from Al Young, though, are the personal ones that came in his typically typo-filled letters and emails. Those words could be as challenging as they were encouraging (and they certainly were in his many responses to my various drafts of Whose Revolution), but in the end they were invariably perceptive and, above all, right on the mark. Like many of us who knew and loved Al, I can’t imagine making my way in the history profession without his friendship, guidance, and commitment as an ally, both professional and political. I get uneasy with the term “mentor,” because it’s thrown around so easily these days,  but if I had to pick the one historian whose opinion I most wanted to know, whose advice and criticism I most willingly took, and whose acceptance of my work I most wanted to have, it’d be Al. He’s gone now, but I suspect he’ll always be with me, with all of us, as a model of intellectual courage, integrity, and generosity. We may not be able to meet the standards he set for us but, in his memory, we still ought to try.

Gregory Nobles is Professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with professor Alfred F. Young, he is the author of Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding.

On Veterans Day: A look at the past and present

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Yesterday marked the 93rd Veterans Day since the holiday’s enactment in 1919. And, depending on where you work or go to school, observations for the important day are still underway at this moment. This year, to celebrate our veterans, our thoughts immediately sprang to the newly released In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation—a book that chronicles the lives of Korean War soldiers, and, in doing so, voices a greater truth about the pain, bravery, and selflessness of the men and women who have served our country. Here the author, Melinda L. Pash, takes us back to the beginnings of her book (it all started at a high school prom…) and shows us the unwavering support the older generation of soldiers have for today’s troops.

Watch more from this interview over at our Youtube page.

Before the polls close: Early lessons from the 2012 campaign

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—Michael Serazio

On this eve of the 2012 presidential election, the victor and final outcome remain, of course, unknown to us. Yet independent of tomorrow’s Electoral College tally, a number of campaign patterns and marketing trends already seem triumphant. Presidential contests offer the country, among many other things, a quadrennial opportunity to take stock of the state of media, technology, and culture. And irrespective of issues—looking purely at the playing of the game—the 2012 cycle will likely be enshrined in collective memory for its speed, fragmentation, and use of data.

The acceleration of news cycles is, by no means, a phenomenon unique to 2012—sound-bites that lasted, on average, an upwards of 50 seconds in the late 1960s had already shriveled to a mere ten by 1992. Yet in this campaign season, Twitter assumed a key role by further increasing velocity and abridging exposition. Moreover, as the “second screen” site for much social TV-watching during the conventions and debates, it offered an opinion-leader, focus group monitoring tool for campaign staff to gauge conventional wisdom as it took shape in real time. And that medium may, in fact, be handicapping the message and, in turn, the potential for thoughtful policy: As Herman Cain’s director of new media quipped, “Mitt Romney’s 59-point plan can’t fit in a tweet.” But “9-9-9” (pizza discount that it may sound like) needs just five characters to convey tax plans—nuance be damned.

The single most symbolic quote of the election was neither “47%” nor “You didn’t build that,” but arguably a Romney pollster’s intimation that, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” And, lo, how both camps could! Even as the press redoubled its fact-checking brigades—including a heroic on-the-spot effort by CNN’s Candy Crowley in the second debate—the capacity of voters to nuzzle in their own fragmented information cocoons meant that campaigns rarely paid the price for playing fast and loose with truthiness. “We don’t collect news to inform us. We collect news to affirm us,” GOP operative Frank Luntz aptly articulated. And with a media whose bias is more toward conflict (be it stupid or substantive) than left or right, and an online space that prizes speed over accuracy, citizens had increasingly fewer arbiters of a common political reality. As an Obama 2008 staffer distressingly noted, “research from campaigns has essentially replaced investigative reporting.”

But perhaps the defining feature of marketing strategy in 2012 has been the sophisticated use of voter data and statistical modeling to persuade and mobilize the electorate. Between hypertargeting via browser cookies and extensive online tracking operations, there is a potential for the granular customization of politics: “Two people in the same house could get different messages… Not only will the message change, the type of content will change,” boasted Romney’s digital director. Moreover, many of those political messages may well deliberately filter in through social networks, both online and off, as campaigns strategize “if, say, a phone call from a distant cousin or new friend would be more likely prompt the urge to cast a ballot.”

As I argue in Your Ad Here, my forthcoming book from NYU Press, the commercial side of the marketing industry has been grappling with many of these patterns and initiatives for years: faster communication environments, fragmenting audience niches, and grassroots scheming through social media. Tomorrow’s winner may well have navigated these challenges successfully through the election season, but the game changes on November 7. You can campaign in poetry in less than 140 characters; governing in prose takes a wider medium.

Michael Serazio is Assistant Professor of Communication at Fairfield University and the author of Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013).

For our First Black President, no more racial niceties

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—Enid Logan

Social scientists have spent a great deal of time in recent years writing about covert racism, also known as colorblind racism, have-a-nice-day racism, or racism lite. Many of us have believed ourselves to have entered into a new racial era wherein overt racist sentiments are rarely uttered aloud, and in which the mechanisms that sustain white supremacy, though insidious and impactful, are now much more subtle and hard to pin down. But then Barack Obama ran for, and won, the presidency and Overt Racism once again reared its ugly head.

At this juncture, I believe, many scholars and non-scholars alike are trying to figure out just what is going on. How is it that in the era of racial niceties, where racial meaning is most often conveyed through “sanitized” and deracialized discourse, old style racism, overt racism, or “Archie Bunker” racism has suddenly moved from the fringes to the conservative mainstream? How is it that a moment that was supposed to represent the nation’s triumph over racism has seemingly lead to the opposite?

In the last several years, we have seen the vilest of racial imagery applied to the President, his young daughters, and his wife. Particularly visible early on was the signage at the rallies of the so-called “Tea Party” in 2009-2010. President Obama was figured variously as an African witch doctor, as Hitler, or as a white-faced Joker, with black circles around his eyes and bloody red lips. Comments about the Obamas left on the internet over the past several years have been especially vicious. And, in November 2009, it was revealed that the top ranked Google search image for Michelle Obama was a Photoshopped rendering of her as an ape. As sociologists Adia Harvey Wingfield and Joe Feagin report, in July 2009, one anonymous reader at the Free Republic—an online message board for independent, grass-roots conservatism—described 11-year old Malia Obama “as ‘a common street whore’…and went on to “wonder when she will get her first abortion.” And in March of this year, a federal judge circulated an email in which it was implied that Barack Obama had been conceived at a party during which his mother had had sex with both a black man and a dog.

Since the beginning of his presidency, Obama has faced lashes of anger and incivility directed at him from white elected officials. Consider Congressman Joe Wilson who yelled “You lie!” at Obama from the Senate floor, and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who greeted the President with a finger in the face as he arrived at a Phoenix airport. Once considered primarily to be an extremist, fringe political movement, the Tea Party itself has achieved sweeping electoral success, as a number of its candidates were elected to the U.S. Congress during the 2010 midterm elections, largely on the grounds of their fierce opposition to the President.

During his brief, fake bid for the Republican presidential nomination, business tycoon Donald Trump based his entire political platform on the clearly race-baiting ideology of “birtherism.” This is the view that Obama’s presidency is illegitimate, because his birth certificate is a fake, and that he is not a U.S. citizen. While this belief would seem to be a highly illogical and irrational one, an August 2010 poll found that 41% of Republicans and 1 in 4 Americans overall believed that the president was probably lying about his citizenship.

But perhaps the most ominous development we have seen in recent years lies in the area of voter policy. Legislatures in 41 states have introduced restrictive voter identification laws in the last year, designed expressly to limit the access to vote. Voting rights would particularly be curtailed among the young, the elderly, and non-whites—all liberal-leaning constituencies that are likely to vote for President Obama in 2012. Critics have likened these measures to the poll taxes and literacy tests that restricted African American access to the vote for seven and a half decades after the Reconstruction.

So what has happened? Was Overt Racism always already in the background, ready to reemerge at any moment, and had we just been fooling ourselves to think that it would stay there? Is this a calculated political strategy on the part of the Right, designed to inflame racial fears and drive whites to the polls on election day? Or does it represent the uncoordinated, inchoate rage of a segment of the white population that perceives itself to be imperiled by the impending “non-white” demographic takeover of the U.S.?

I believe it to be a mixture of the two. The reaction demonstrates that for all the claims that Obama is a milquetoast moderate who has brought about very little change and done almost nothing to shake up the status quo, not everyone is in agreement. The reappearance of Overt Racism in the Age of Obama tells us that white racial anxiety and anti-black hostility in the U.S., as well as an abiding investment in the U.S. as a white nation, run much, much deeper than many of us had imagined.

Obama’s victory seemed at first to portend great things for the U.S. As I have written in my recent book, from 2006 to 2008, a chorus of pundits proclaimed that Barack Obama offered redemption, absolution, and renewal to the nation, all of which was refracted through the magic of his blackness. Above all, we were told, the election of a black man as president would prove that whites had largely gotten over the issue of race, and Real Racism was now firmly in our past.  But this has been proven to be manifestly false. And let’s be clear. It was John McCain who won the majority of the white vote (56%) in 2008, and without the high turnout of the black, Latino and Asian electorate, he would have won the presidency.

Obama’s election was without a doubt a triumphal and defining moment in our nation’s history. But it was a moment that awoke the dormant T-Rex of Race, igniting a special kind of fear and loathing in the nation, aimed directly at our First Black President. If Obama wins the election in 2012, it will be despite the power of racial fears to sway some whites towards the GOP ticket. It will also be because the expanding multiracial electorate turns out for Obama in large numbers, thus helping continue our march towards an America that is red, white, blue, and brown.

Enid Logan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her book, “At this Defining Moment”: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race was published by NYU Press in 2011.

Why would anyone confess to something they didn’t do?

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—David A. Harris

For years, I, like most people, did not believe that a person would ever confess to a serious crime he or she didn’t commit. It just seemed implausible: admitting to a crime meant you were subjecting yourself to punishment—maybe decades in prison or even death. There’s no way you’d do that unless it were true (or you were forced into it).

Of course, with DNA on the scene for more than 20 years, we know better: people do confess to crimes they did not commit, usually because of the huge pressures brought to bear on them in the interrogation room. According to the Innocence Project, about a quarter of the post-conviction DNA-based exonerations on record featured a false confession, or a false statement of guilt of some kind.

Here’s a story that makes a good example of how and why this can happen. In this case, a man named Richard Lapointe falsely confessed to a rape and murder, serving 23 years in prison as a result. Now, a court has ruled that he must receive a new trial. The flaws of Lapointe’s interrogation puts many of the major causes of false confessions on display. For example:

  • The interrogation was not recorded. Recording of interrogations can reduce false confessions and supply an indisputable record of what was said in the interrogation room.
  • The police lied to Lapointe about falsified scientific evidence. Police are allowed to lie in interrogations, but lies about scientific and forensic testing make prison seem inescapable, forcing the suspect to tell the police what they want to hear in order to stop the pressure.
  • The interrogation continued for about nine hours, far longer than average. This increases the chances of a false confession.
  • Lapointe was brain damaged, and the police knew it. Mental disabilities make false confessions more likely.

Lapointe’s case is an object lesson in what can go wrong—and what we should be doing to make sure this doesn’t happen. We should record all interrogations, front to back; prohibit lying to suspects about test results; and limit the interrogation time to two hours, with extensions—perhaps to four hours—only with a supervisor’s permission. These simple steps can keep us from hearing more stories like Lapointe’s in the future.

David A. Harris is Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Good Cops: The Case for Preventive Policing and Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work and Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science (NYU Press, 2012).

This article first appeared on the author’s blog. Read more here.